


you wish to hell i was not here

by paperclipbitch



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Community: angst_bingo, Gen, Gen Fic, handwavy time setting, i refuse to believe these two didn't meet sometime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-17
Updated: 2012-09-17
Packaged: 2017-11-14 11:18:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/514671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>That’s the thing about this new generation – they’ve never had much time for royalty.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	you wish to hell i was not here

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the _scandal_ square of my angst bingo card. Title from _I Want Blood_ by Empires. I just... want this to have happened; no set time period, but before Hal meets Cutler or Leo.

The meeting place is a pub: reasonably quiet, shrouded in cigarette smoke, smelling of cheap beer and men and something like despair. Hal bites the inside of his lower lip, forcing himself to keep his expression neutral, and looks around for Herrick’s puppet. Right hand man. Whatever name he prefers to be known by that glamorises his role a little. 

He orders himself a pint and sits in the corner, looking down at the scrubbed stained table, tapping a tattoo on the inside of his knee. It isn’t nerves, but he needs it to stay calm. He knows a few things about the man he’s meeting, and, well, he doesn’t know exactly how he is meant to feel about any of this.

John Mitchell drops into the seat opposite him, smelling of rain and blood, eyes bright, hair tangled. 

“Lord Harry,” he drawls.

That’s the thing about this new generation – they’ve never had much time for royalty. The fights haven’t changed and they still need canon fodder, but the times are ticking on. Hal has men who’ll drown in their own blood in the churned up dirt but this isn’t _Henry V_ ; they still won’t thank him for it.

“Mr Mitchell,” he replies, calm, steady. The hierarchy of vampirism is one made up mainly of facades, of bluffing, of refusing to blink. Hal is clinging onto his increasingly distasteful power by his nails, with Herrick pulling at the loose threads around the edges, and he isn’t always sure that he even _wants_ this century’s ideas of _superiority_. All things considered, peasants were far easier. 

_Politics_ , honestly.

Mitchell’s grin is ragged, fangs and something feral, and he’d be handsome if his hair were less tangled, his eyes less glassy. Hal’s heard _stories_ about John Mitchell, and there’s something familiar in his atrocities. Oh, he cannot compare with the things Hal has done, but then he has had much less time. The twentieth century is full of human horrors that Hal could never have dreamed of in his early years, when swords and shields were still the weapons of choice, but society itself is more rigid in an attempt to compensate. Hal has fought in more wars than he suspects Mitchell ever will, but he’s also lived through ages that were more violent, more cruel, more crazed. 

If you want to _truly_ do something so horrific it will be remembered forever, the kind of thing you have to lock into a box in the back of your mind for your own safety and sanity, then you need to live through a time far worse than this.

Hal could tell John Mitchell all of this now. He could offer him a handful of advice that will probably not be heeded, but he can see that he wants to be a legend, clinging to Herrick’s coat tails as he is. Hal is part amused, part disdainful, part pitying. He knows all too well what it is like to want to prove yourself, to build yourself a throne of other people’s bones, and as time has gone on things have only become harder. Herrick is… well, Hal has never liked him, has never enjoyed the necessary negotiations and small talk and bitter bright false smiles, but there’s no denying that he is _evil_ in a way that is perhaps only surpassed by the Old Ones. Hal still struggles to think of himself as an Old One, even with the people calling him _lord_ with honest fervour in their eyes; the honour bestowed on him for a handful of lifetimes of murder and hunger and ruthlessness. He sometimes finds himself wondering if this is really what he wanted, what he worked for all along, clawing his way through the ranks until people backed away from him like he was a tiger that might turn around and rip them to pieces, a ticking bomb that could go off without warning. Lord Harry. 

“Does Herrick have a message for me?” Hal asks, making sure to sound a little bored. 

“You’re not going to bother with small talk?” Mitchell laughs, shoulders shifting under his battered leather jacket. Hal feels distant, superior, in his tailored suit and slicked down hair, fedora sitting on the table beside his drink. Mitchell has dirt underneath his nails and two days’ growth of beard, and the way he’s looking at Hal between dark eyelashes would be unsettling if Hal hadn’t looked into the mouth of Hell and let it stare back. Nothing frightens him anymore, except himself.

He arches an eyebrow in response to Mitchell’s question, watching as Mitchell raises his own pint and drinks half of it in one go. They’re both playing their own versions of nonchalant, though the air between them is crackling a little, and people at nearby tables are edging backwards. 

“I have no interest in anything you have to say,” Hal tells him evenly. Underneath the table, the he increases the speed of his tapping on the inside of his knee. There are times when he goes _mad_ , when his distaste for this life leads to him running, hiding, overwhelmed by guilt and misery and determined that this time, _this time_ , he will never go back.

He always does, though, better and brighter than ever, his very own phoenix. Allowances are always made for your eccentricities when everyone believes that you’re crazy.

“Herrick said you’re a snobby bastard,” Mitchell grins, sitting back in his chair. “Are all the Old Ones like you?”

“I’m considered the polite one,” Hal informs him, and although he doesn’t smile, he lets the corner of his mouth flicker a little.

Mitchell laughs, bright and real and sharp, and Hal thinks that in other circumstances, if they were _real_ people and not vicious murdering demons – well, they wouldn’t get on any better, but it’s possible that they’d both be likeable. What they are now, well. 

“Fuck you,” Mitchell says easily, and the tension spills out of his shoulders.

“So why can’t Herrick meet me himself?” Hal asks, reaching for a packet of cigarettes inside his jacket. Mitchell produces a box of matches and strikes one, leaning over to light it for him. 

“He pities you for doing your own dirty work,” Mitchell explains, accepting a cigarette when Hal reluctantly offers him one; he’s still unfailingly polite, after all. 

“And he trusts you implicitly?” Hal can’t help asking.

Something about Mitchell bristles. “Why wouldn’t he?”

Oh, John Mitchell has a long way to go and so much left to learn. If Hal cared about such things anymore, he’d hope that Mitchell doesn’t have to learn them the hard way – but he doesn’t and Mitchell will. They all do.

Hal gestures vaguely with the cigarette, watching Mitchell’s scowl. “It’s been a while since I bothered with delegation,” he allows.

Everyone has their own leadership styles, and Hal’s has never matched up with Herrick’s. Vampires never truly _like_ each other, instead relying on uneasy truces, but some are more uneasy than others and, well, for all the pretence that meeting in a pub with drinks and innocent bystanders, this is still an ultimatum.

“Maybe you should try it.” Mitchell’s eyes are glittering, brutal and unforgiving, and all the false camaraderie in the world won’t make them actual _comrades_.

Hal’s formative years, both human and vampire, were a long time ago. Mitchell’s are now, and there are things he’ll never understand until it’s too late. There’s nothing glorious left about this life, nothing glamorous and decadent, nothing worth keeping. 

“So what does Herrick want to tell me?” he asks, breaking the uneasy breathlessness that has taken over their corner, and when he glances away he sees that all the tables near them have cleared, the pub quietening down even though it should be a busy night. Even if they don’t understand what is happening, nobody wants to be near this.

Mitchell takes a long drag of his cigarette before stubbing it straight out on the table. He won’t last, Hal thinks detachedly, people like him don’t; they burn too fast and too bright and too determined, and something vicious will become of him. Hal’s lasted this long because he knows all the little games and how to play them, wearying though it is.

“You know what he wants to say,” Mitchell shrugs. “This city won’t hold both of you, so you can leave or you can fight.”

Something flickers in Hal, that he can be _spoken_ to like this by an impudent _boy_ who got his throat torn open in that filthy war that chewed the world up and spat it out again, but this is really all just part of a quarrel that’s centuries old, that Mitchell can never be part of no matter how many times he tries to fight his way into it.

“Right,” he says, and stands, putting his hat back on, angling it automatically. He hasn’t touched his drink, and it sits sweating onto the table.

“No message for him?” Mitchell asks, still lazily lounging in his seat, smug and secure and monstrous. Someone staggering home drunkenly tonight will not make it as far as their front door but, well, that’s collateral. A few decades ago, no one in this pub would have made it out alive; the times really _are_ changing. 

Hal looks down at him and thinks about the _message_ it would send Herrick if his herald were sent back to him in pieces inside a cardboard box, but, well, negotiations don’t work that way anymore. 

Pity.

“No,” he says, and when he walks out into the night he doesn’t look back.


End file.
